Google is tracking sustainable raw materials. Will fashion buy in?
Sourcing raw materials and tracking their sustainability is set to become easier with a new partnership between Google and WWF Sweden. The partnership will analyse more than 20 commonly used raw materials, including synthetics and natural products, via a dashboard being built specifically to help fashion brands. The two organisations will score each material and sourcing location on details such as water scarcity and air pollution and will estimate impacts such as greenhouse gas emissions, building on an earlier project tracking of cotton and viscose.
WWF Sweden will provide data on risk, life-cycle assessment (an estimate of the environmental impact in a product’s lifetime) and the strength of sustainability solutions for raw materials. It will also provide the framework for calculating and processing each type of data. Google is providing access to Google Earth Engine data, such as satellite imagery, and computing power that is able to derive insights from complex data sets.
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